Todd Field's ""Little Children"" lives and breathes the language of American suburbia—not just the grating drone of daytime chatter, but also the hidden bitterness of lives spent in unhappy marriages, among horrible, sex-starved, pointless people. Like all good satires, it feels closer to the truth than the most precise of photographs. A barely interested narrator, whose monotone voice suggests dull scientific study, provides commentary throughout. The effect is quietly hilarious, like a futile effort to be reasonable and calm.
Kate Winslet, an Oscar nominee for her performance here, is the film's central suburbanite. Smarter than the other neighborhood moms, she understands how pathetic and meaningless her world is. When she meets Patrick Wilson, whose ""Mr. Mom"" attitude charms her, she feels like they understand each other in an unspoken way. After discovering her husband's addiction to online porn—in a very funny scene—she starts spending progressively more time with Wilson, until finally a steamy affair ensues.
Against the backdrop of Winslet's adultery, her community copes with shocking news: A child sex offender (Jackie Earle Haley, also an Oscar nominee) has moved into the neighborhood, recently released from prison after a short sentence for indecent exposure. Immediately, thousands of fliers go up notifying parents of the imminent danger awaiting their children. In perfect seriousness, several mothers suggest castrating Haley—""That's the only way to really fix it. You know that, right?"" One cruel father harasses him at home constantly, plastering his door with ""Are your children safe?"" fliers and frightening his sick mother. It's as if the neighborhood residents have finally found somebody objectively worse than themselves and are delighted to be so reassured.
Certainly, this subject matter is topical. Our news media never fails to report the relocation of child predators, capitalizing on the ensuing community outrage. ""Little Children"" will likely be targeted by Bill O'Reilly and other militant advocates of ""community notification.""
But ""Little Children"" is a serious dramatic satire, not an op-ed piece, and it doesn't take a political position. Haley's pedophilia is hardly embraced. When he visits the public pool, swimming for several minutes before being noticed, we feel afraid for the children swimming alongside him. By playing into our own paranoia, Field helps us understand the community's reaction. We'd probably be the same way.
Yet Haley is the only character in the film who understands his weaknesses and vices—who knows he is a bad person and ultimately (very literally) tries to do something about it. For that he gains our sympathy. His fellow characters, on the other hand, operate under delusions of perfection or moral superiority. And every last one of them is as miserable and psychologically imprisoned as Haley—not least Winslet (for all her charm and wit), whose adulterous rebellion against suburbia is misplaced. Winslet's and Haley's characters are decidedly very different, but each performance conveys the private hell of being judged for sexual deviancy.
""Little Children"" is, all things considered, an excellent Oscar-season entry. Like ""American Beauty,"" its comic darkness and serious dramatic tension are never in conflict. Its central performances convey their characters' miseries with phenomenal pathos. Field's and Todd Perrotta's screenplay (based on Perrotta's novel) understands the suburbanite mentality all too well. If ""Little Children"" lacks the power of Field's masterpiece ""In The Bedroom,"" marred by a weaker climax and several irrelevant and distracting side-plots, it compensates with its unsettling honesty.
